Profit from Holocaust AI fakes

'OFFENSIVE': CONTENT CREATORS, OFTEN IN SOUTH ASIA, EARN FROM REACTIONS TO IMAGES

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The Facebook post shows a photo of a pretty curly-haired girl on a tricycle and says she is Hannelore Kaufmann, a 13-year-old from Berlin who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

But there is no such Holocaust victim and the photo is not real. It's generated by AI.

Content creators, often based in South Asia, are churning out such posts for money, targeting Westerners' emotional reactions to the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people died, researchers said.

Critics say such AI-generated images, text and videos are offensive and contribute to Holocaust distortion by conjuring up a "fantasy-land Auschwitz".

The Auschwitz museum sounded the alarm over the trend. "We're dealing with the creation of a false reality – because it is falsifying images... falsifying history," museum spokesperson Pawel Sawicki said.

The museum at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where one million Jews were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland, first noticed the posts in May, Sawicki said.

Some reproduced the museum's posts about victims but changed the images using AI, without flagging this.

"You can see the photo is based on the original but it's completely changed," Sawicki said.